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Page 34
We may illustrate by imagining a row of people seated in a moving
street-car, into which darts a boy of eight, calling out the details of
the last murder, in the hope of selling an evening newspaper. A
comfortable looking man buys a paper from him with no sense of moral
shock; he may even be a trifle complacent that he has helped along the
little fellow, who is making his way in the world. The philanthropic
lady sitting next to him may perhaps reflect that it is a pity that such
a bright boy is not in school. She may make up her mind in a moment of
compunction to redouble her efforts for various newsboys' schools and
homes, that this poor child may have better teaching, and perhaps a
chance at manual training. She probably is convinced that he alone, by
his unaided efforts, is supporting a widowed mother, and her heart is
moved to do all she can for him. Next to her sits a workingman trained
in trades-union methods. He knows that the boy's natural development is
arrested, and that the abnormal activity of his body and mind uses up
the force which should go into growth; moreover, that this premature use
of his powers has but a momentary and specious value. He is forced to
these conclusions because he has seen many a man, entering the factory
at eighteen and twenty, so worn out by premature work that he was "laid
on the shelf" within ten or fifteen years. He knows very well that he
can do nothing in the way of ameliorating the lot of this particular
boy; that his only possible chance is to agitate for proper child-labor
laws; to regulate, and if possible prohibit, street-vending by children,
in order that the child of the poorest may have his school time secured
to him, and may have at least his short chance for growth.
These three people, sitting in the street car, are all honest and
upright, and recognize a certain duty toward the forlorn children of the
community. The self-made man is encouraging one boy's own efforts; the
philanthropic lady is helping on a few boys; the workingman alone is
obliged to include all the boys of his class. Workingmen, because of
their feebleness in all but numbers, have been forced to appeal to the
state, in order to secure protection for themselves and for their
children. They cannot all rise out of their class, as the occasionally
successful man has done; some of them must be left to do the work in the
factories and mines, and they have no money to spend in philanthropy.
Both public agitation and a social appeal to the conscience of the
community is necessary in order to secure help from the state, and,
curiously enough, child-labor laws once enacted and enforced are a
matter of great pride, and even come to be regarded as a register of the
community's humanity and enlightenment. If the method of public
agitation could find quiet and orderly expression in legislative
enactment, and if labor measures could be submitted to the examination
and judgment of the whole without a sense of division or of warfare, we
should have the ideal development of the democratic state.
But we judge labor organizations as we do other living institutions, not
by their declaration of principles, which we seldom read, but by their
blundering efforts to apply their principles to actual conditions, and
by the oft-time failure of their representatives, when the individual
finds himself too weak to become the organ of corporate action.
The very blunders and lack of organization too often characterizing a
union, in marked contrast to the orderly management of a factory, often
confuse us as to the real issues involved, and we find it hard to trust
uncouth and unruly manifestations of social effort. The situation is
made even more complicated by the fact that those who are formulating a
code of associated action so often break through the established code of
law and order. As society has a right to demand of the reforming
individual that he be sternly held to his personal and domestic claims,
so it has a right to insist that labor organizations shall keep to the
hardly won standards of public law and order; and the community performs
but its plain duty when it registers its protest every time law and
order are subverted, even in the interest of the so-called social
effort. Yet in moments of industrial stress and strain the community is
confronted by a moral perplexity which may arise from the mere fact that
the good of yesterday is opposed to the good of today, and that which
may appear as a choice between virtue and vice is really but a choice
between virtue and virtue. In the disorder and confusion sometimes
incident to growth and progress, the community may be unable to see
anything but the unlovely struggle itself.
The writer recalls a conversation between two workingmen who were
leaving a lecture on "Organic Evolution." The first was much puzzled,
and anxiously inquired of the second "if evolution could mean that one
animal turned into another." The challenged workman stopped in the rear
of the hall, put his foot upon a chair, and expounded what he thought
evolution did mean; and this, so nearly as the conversation can be
recalled, is what he said: "You see a lot of fishes are living in a
stream, which overflows in the spring and strands some of them upon the
bank. The weak ones die up there, but others make a big effort to get
back into the water. They dig their fins into the sand, breathe as much
air as they can with their gills, and have a terrible time. But after a
while their fins turn into legs and their gills into lungs, and they
have become frogs. Of course they are further along than the sleek,
comfortable fishes who sail up and down the stream waving their tails
and despising the poor damaged things thrashing around on the bank.
He--the lecturer--did not say anything about men, but it is easy enough
to think of us poor devils on the dry bank, struggling without enough to
live on, while the comfortable fellows sail along in the water with all
they want and despise us because we thrash about." His listener did not
reply, and was evidently dissatisfied both with the explanation and the
application. Doubtless the illustration was bungling in more than its
setting forth, but the story is suggestive.
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